Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  And what luck the Meeker had bumped the controls, because the sensors had just detected an object drifting in the voids. “Eye! What the ash is that?”

  The mist of the Eye collapsed into a sphere like a newborn star. “An unknown! Meeker, change course to intercept!”

  The Meeker obeyed, and their Bulb banked through rarefied crimson wisps, cosmic ash that would never again coalesce into stars. “Do you think it’s from the Zimbim?” he said, as if he’d known those majestic builders himself. “You know they once lived on ninety planets and rebuilt all their crystal cities in a day?”

  “I do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”

  After four weeks of travel he said, “Do you think it’s a baby Qly? You know they could grow to swallow galaxies, but preferred to curl around young stars and sing electromagnetic eulogies into space?”

  “I do,” said the Eye. “But tell me again.”

  And nine months after that he said, “Could it be a wayward Urm, those planetary rings that ate emotions?” The Bulb had slowed considerably by now, and the scattered stars had lost their endearing blue shift, turned red, ancient, tired. “Or maybe,” he said, “it’s a philosophizing Ruck worm. You know their proverbs were spoken by half the galaxy?”

  “I do,” said the Eye, “But tell me again.”

  “What I would give,” the Meeker said, “just to glimpse the Long Gone.”

  They passed a rare star, a red dwarf that had smoldered for eons. Normally the Meeker would capture it in the Bulb’s gravity well and ferry the star to the Great Corpus at the center of the galaxy. There the Eye’s body would gain a few quadrillion more qubits, and a tremble of gravitational waves would ripple forever out into the abyss. But today they flew past the star, the first time the Meeker had ever skipped one.

  In a maneuver he hoped made the Eye proud, he captured the object in the hold on the first pass, only bumping it once against the wall as he accelerated back toward the galactic center.

  “Have it brought to the lab,” said the Eye. “And join me there after you finish correcting our course.”

  The lab was tiny compared to most of the rooms on the Bulb. Sundry sensors crowded the space, and a clear, hollow cylinder dominated the center. The strange object hovered inside: a rectangular stone, dark as basalt, glimmering with a metallic sheen. Curious glyphs had been inscribed upon it, though heavy pitting had erased most of them.

  The Meeker secreted calming mucus from his pores and said, “Was I right? Is it from the Long Gone?”

  “Yes, Meeker. It is.”

  He felt like leaping, and his limbs flailed excitedly. “What is it?”

  “I’m still determining that. So far, I’ve discovered a volume of information encoded in its crystalline structure, a massively compressed message that uses a curious fractal algorithm. It has stymied all my attempts to decode it. I’ve relayed the contents to my Great Corpus for further help.”

  “How strange and wonderful!” the Meeker said. “A message in a stone! But which civilization is it from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The Meeker’s third stomach shifted uncomfortably. There had never been a fact the Eye did not know, a puzzle she could not quickly solve.

  The Eye morphed into a dodecahedron. “Finally! My Corpus has just decoded a fragment of the message.”

  “What does it say?”

  “The message encodes a lifeform, which I will now attempt to recreate.”

  His outer sheath grew slimy with anticipation. He was going to see a creature from the Long Gone!

  A second tube materialized beside the first. A grotesque lump of quivering flesh formed inside it before collapsing into a pile of red ichor.

  “How lovely!” he said.

  The Eye expanded into a mist. “That’s not the creature. I’ve used the wrong chirality for the nucleic acids. I will try again.”

  Did the Great All-Seeing Eye just err? he thought. How is this possible?

  The lump vaporized and vanished, and a new shape formed. First came a crude framework of hard white mineral, then a flood of viscous fluids, soft organs and wet tissues, all wrapped under a covering of beige skin.

  “Close your outer sheath,” the Eye said. “I’m changing the atmosphere and temperature to match the creature’s tolerances.”

  The Eye didn’t pause, and if the Meeker hadn’t acted instantly, he would’ve died in the searing heat and pressure. The air was now so dense that he could feel his nine limbs press against it as they fluttered about.

  The cylinder door swung open and out poured a sour-smelling mist. Thinking this was a greeting, the Meeker flatulated a sweet-smelling response.

  Four limbs spoked out from the creature’s rectangular torso. A bulbous lump rose from the top. It had two deep-set orbs, a hooked flange of skin over two small openings, and a pink-lipped orifice covering rows of white mineral. Crimson fibers, the same smoldering shade as the ancient stars, draped from its peak. The Meeker had never seen anything more disgusting.

  “What the . . . ?” the creature said, its voice low-pitched in the dense air. “Where am I?”

  The Meeker gasped. “It speaks from its anus?”

  “That’s its mouth,” said the Eye.

  This foul creature was far different from the glorious ancients he had imagined, and he felt a little disappointed.

  “Welcome to Bulb 64545,” said the Eye. “I am the All-Seeing Eye, and this is Meeker 6655321. I have adjusted your body so you can understand and speak Verbal Sub-Four, our common tongue. Who are you?”

  “I . . . I’m Beth,” the creature said. “Where am I?”

  The Eye told the Beth how she had been constructed from an encoded message. “It’s been millennia since I last discovered something new in the galaxy. Your presence astonishes me.”

  “Yeah,” the Beth said, “it astonishes me too.”

  “And me!” added the Meeker.

  “Millennia?” the Beth said. Pink membranes flashed before her white and green orbs. Were these crude things her eyes?

  “What species are you?” said the Eye.

  The Beth grasped her shoulders as if to squeeze herself. “I’m human.”

  “Curious. I’ve no record of your kind. Where are you from?”

  The Beth made a raspy wet sound with her throat and looked up at the ceiling, when the green circles in her eyes sparkled like interstellar frost. The rest of her was difficult to look at, but these strange eyes were profoundly more beautiful than the wisps of lithium clouds diffracting the morning sun into rainbows during his home moon’s sluggish dawn.

  “Denver,” she said.

  “What do you last remember?” asked the Eye.

  “I was in a dark space,” said the Beth. “Sloan was there, holding my hand.”

  “Who is the Sloan?”

  “She’s my wife. And who—what are you?”

  The Meeker let loose a spray of pheromone-scented mucus. “I’m the Meeker, your humble pilot! And this is the Great All-Seeing Eye!”

  “But what are you?”

  The Eye collapsed into a torus. “This will take time to explain.”

  “I’m freezing. Do you have any clothes?”

  Freezing? the Meeker thought. It was hot enough to melt water ice!

  But with the Eye’s help, the Beth covered herself in white fabrics. He didn’t understand why she needed to sheathe herself in an artificial skin when she already wore a natural one.

  “I’m not well,” she said, holding her head.

  The Eye floated beside her. “It may be a side-effect of your regeneration.”

  “No. I’m sick.”

  “Are you referring to the genetic material rapidly replicating inside your cells?”

  “You know about the virus?”

  “I observed the phenomenon when I created you, but I assumed it was part of your natural genetic pattern.”

  “No. It most definitely isn’t. Do you have any water?”

  A clear cylind
er materialized on a table beside her.

  “Oh,” the Beth said, flinching. “That will take some getting used to.”

  She poured the searing hot liquid into her mouth, but her hands shook and she spilled half onto the floor. Red lines spiraled in from the corners of her eyes. “Is anyone else here?”

  The Eye’s toroid body rippled. “Just the three of us.”

  “No other humans?”

  “According to my estimation, the stone was drifting in space for five hundred million years. It is likely that you’re the last of your kind.”

  “So . . . Sloan is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she was just beside me!”

  “From your perspective. In reality, that moment occurred millions of years ago.”

  The Beth put a hand to her mouth. “Oh my god . . .”

  “Yes?” said the Eye.

  The Beth gazed at the Eye for a long moment, then her eyes narrowed. “Sloan whispered to me, just before I woke up. She said she had a message for the future, for whoever wakes me. It was, she said, something that would change the course of history. A terrible fact that must be known.”

  The Eye moved closer to her. “Tell me. Tell me this fact!”

  “My son. He . . .” She swallowed. “He asphyxiated in the womb.”

  “How terrible,” the Meeker said.

  “Continue,” said the Eye.

  “After, they did all these tests, and they discovered I had a virus. I had transmitted it to my unborn son. He never had a chance. Sloan said that my virus, the one that’s in my blood, it was from . . . it was created for . . . it was made by . . . Oh, god, I’m going to be—”

  Her eyes rolled back into her head and she vomited yellow fluid onto the floor. She crashed forward and her head slammed into the table, then she shuddered in a violent paroxysm.

  “What’s happening?” the Meeker said.

  “It’s the virus,” said the Eye.

  “Can you stop it?”

  But the Beth stopped on her own, and all went still but for a faint hiss from her mouth.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “She’s dead,” said the Eye.

  He felt a pang of panic. “But she’s only just come alive!” Was this brief glimpse all he would ever see of the Long Gone?

  “Do not fret, Meeker. I am already creating another Beth.”

  An hour later they sat in the cockpit, the Meeker on the left, the Beth in the middle, and the Eye on the right, as the Bulb hurtled toward the galactic center at half the speed of light.

  The Beth had wrapped herself in a heavy blanket and pulled it close to her body. She seemed amazed with everything she saw. “But if we’re in space, where have all the stars gone?” A red dwarf, seven light years away, floated against a backdrop of absolute black.

  “We harvested them,” the Meeker said, secreting a mucus of pride.

  “Harvested? Why?”

  “The matter we collect,” said the Eye, “is cooled to near absolute-zero, quantum entangled into a condensate, and joined with my Great Corpus, thus adding to my total computational power.”

  “You’re a computer?”

  “The Eye,” the Meeker said, “is the greatest mind the Cosmos has ever known.”

  “My sole purpose is knowledge,” said the Eye. “I seek to know all things.”

  “So many stars, gone,” the Beth said. “Was there life out there?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the Meeker. “There were once so many species they ran out of names!”

  “And now?”

  “Now they are part of my Great Corpus,” said the Eye.

  “By choice?”

  The Meeker scratched his belly in confusion. “What does choice have to do with it?”

  The Beth pulled her blanket closer. “Everything.”

  “What do you remember about your last moments?” the Eye said.

  The Beth spoke slowly. “Sloan was whispering to me.”

  “And what did she say?”

  The Beth looked down at her hands. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You must tell me,” said the Eye.

  “Why?” She pursed her lips, and fluid pooled in the corners of her eyes. “So you can harvest me too?”

  The Meeker gasped. What offense! He waited for the Eye to punish her, but the Beth coughed up a globule of mucus. This pleased him. She must have realized her offense and offered this up as an apology. But when she vomited all over the console and wailed for a full minute before she fell silent, he realized this had been involuntary.

  “She’s dead?” he said. Red fluid dripped from a wound on her head.

  “Yes, Meeker.”

  “Eye, maybe you should stop making Beths, at least until you find a cure?”

  The Beth vaporized and vanished, as if she never was. “Did you not hear the first Beth? The Sloan had a message for the future that she believed would change history. I must know what this message is.”

  The next Beth began with the same questions, but the Eye avoided telling her too much. And when the Beth asked about the stars, the Eye replied with a question for her.

  “My planet?” the Beth said. “It’s called Dirt. You’ve never heard of it? Where did you find me?” The Beth gazed into the impenetrable black.

  The Meeker was envious. He had been born on an airless moon that orbited the Great Corpus every thousand years and spent the rest of his life in this Bulb.

  “Are we in space?” the Beth said. “Are we beyond the Moon?”

  “You live on the surface of your planet?” asked the Eye.

  “Yes, at the foot of the Rockies, in a glass house. Sloan and I moved there because we love the stars. The Lacteal Path shines clear across the sky most nights.” The Beth chewed at a fingertip. “Where are all the stars? Where are you taking me?”

  “Did the Sloan whisper something to you before you awoke?” the Eye said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Tell me, what did she say?”

  “I’d found out she was working on top secret projects a few months ago. She swore it wasn’t weapons, but I didn’t believe her. We had a big fight. Is there any way I might call her? She’s probably worried sick.”

  “Did the Sloan mention your stillborn child?”

  “Excuse me? How do you know about that?”

  “You transmitted the virus to your fetus in utero. The Sloan intimated that this fact was related to a very important message for the future. Now tell me—”

  “No, that’s not what we spoke about! And how do you know so much about me? What the hell is going on here? I want to go home now!”

  She put a hand to her mouth and vomited all over herself, then she spasmed, smacking her limbs into the Meeker. And after a minute of flailing and screaming she collapsed dead.

  “Curious,” said the Eye. “Did you notice her story has changed?”

  The Beth’s mouth hung open from her scream.

  “That’s not what I noticed, Eye, no.”

  The Eye asked the next Beth about her family.

  “I have two daughters, Bella, ten, and Yrma, twelve. My son Joshua, he’s eighteen, and just left for college in Vermont. Before I got sick, I used to hike up the mountain trails with them at least once a week. Walking with my children under pines covered in snow . . .” She inhaled through her nose. “I never felt more at peace. Is there a way I might call them?”

  “Tell us about the Sloan,” said the Eye. “Did she whisper something to you before you awoke here?”

  “Funny you should mention it.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It was about that day, when I didn’t want to tell the children I was sick. She got angry, but I said she was a hypocrite, because she works in a secret research lab and hides things from us every day.”

  “She researches weapons technology?”

  “She swears she doesn’t. And how do you know that? Have you spoken to her?”

  “Was there anything else
the Sloan said before you woke up here?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t speak about your son, who died in utero?”

  “What? No! What the hell is going on here?” The Beth stood, shaky on her two legs. “I’m not answering any more of your questions until someone tells me—”

  She put a hand to her mouth and vomited. She screamed and spasmed, and when she was dead, the Meeker said, “Eye, why do you keep the truth from her? Shouldn’t she know that her family is dead half a billion years?”

  “What purpose would that serve? You saw how agitated she became when she learned the truth. How else will we find this message the Sloan has given her?”

  “But she dies in pain each time.”

  “Why do you think she’s in pain?”

  “Because she screams so terribly.”

  “Those aren’t screams of pain, Meeker, but of joy. Her eternal life energy is free at last from her temporal body. It’s the same screams of joy that the civilizations of the Long Gone made when I swallowed their worlds.”

  The Meeker had heard her stories a thousand times, he had even told a few back to her. But as he gazed down at the dead Beth and her dripping fluids, he wondered if the Eye was keeping things from him too.

  The next Beth said, “Sloan whispered to me about the sunrise we watched that morning in Mexico. We felt as if we were part of the whole Cosmos, not discrete fragments.”

  “And nothing more?” asked the Eye.

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  Then she died, and the next Beth said, “Sloan whispered that she’d miss drinking her morning coffee with me. Are you taking me home?”

  The next Beth said, speaking of a stringed contrivance used to make music, “Sloan wished I had played guitar more often for her.”

  “And nothing else?” asked the Eye.

  “No.”

  The Eye questioned the Beths in the same way the Meeker approached the stars, not head on, but from the side. The Eye poked and prodded, but each Beth told a different story of her last moments, and each one died screaming.

  “Eye?” the Meeker said, after the fifty-ninth Beth. “What if you never find the Sloan’s message?”

  “All problems have solutions, Meeker. All mysteries have answers.”